Identity crisis for Democrats after Trump stole votes from their base
The Democrats must take ‘dramatic’ action to shore-up their key constituencies, with Donald Trump’s victory smashing the notion that candidates can bank on winning voting groups based on race or gender.
The Democratic Party faces a new identity crisis following its comprehensive defeat at the US election, with Donald Trump’s victory smashing the notion that political candidates can bank on winning voting groups based on race or gender.
The former president on Tuesday won the largest share of non-white voters for the Republican Party in at least half a century, delivering a shock result that is being broadly interpreted as a major political realignment.
In the worst defeat for the Democrats in decades, the party lost the argument with voters on both the economy and on culture as Americans rejected a more progressive vision for the future of their society. And it was men who led the revolt.
Experts are now warning the campaign run by Kamala Harris has exposed the weakness of political strategies rooted in shallow appeals to identity politics, with the election outcome casting far reaching consequences for a party which saw its core constituencies eroded.
The deliberate focus by Ms Harris in the final weeks of the campaign on Mr Trump’s moral failings and past mistakes, likening him to a “fascist” and a threat to democracy, also failed to sway American voters who were more concerned about the state of the economy, price rises and the border.
Egged on by much of the legacy media, the Democrats turned the election into a referendum on Mr Trump’s character only to see their convicted felon opponent go on to sweep the swing states, win the popular vote and flip more than 50 counties - with the Republicans on track to win both the House and Senate.
Republican pollster and co-founder of Echelon Insights, Patrick Ruffini, said that the “defeat should revive the conversation about a formal repudiation of race and gender identity politics in the Democratic Party.”
Author of the “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP,” Mr Ruffini declared that Mr Trump won “more Black men, Latino, and Asian voters because he appealed to their identity as normal working Americans.”
He told The Weekend Australian that the Democratic Party would need to revise its approach to “woke identity politics” given that “voter groups have unambiguously started to reject the party.”
“The move by college educated voters to the Democratic Party and non-college educated and working class voters to the Republican Party is something that’s been pretty durable and going on throughout the last fifty years,” he said.
To stop the trend, Mr Ruffini argued it would “require something dramatic” from the Democrats. He also said the negative campaign against Mr Trump lacked credibility because Ms Harris “never really established herself” or “gave people a sense of who she was.”
Redbridge director Kos Samaras told The Weekend Australian the US election result should be seen as the final nail in the coffin for election campaigns informed by demographic calculations.
“The demographic wall which the Democrats have been relying on to secure victories for them into the future while enabling them not to pay attention to class politics has fallen over,” he said. “In 2016 when confronted with a clear shift of working class communities away from the Democrats to Trump, their retort was ‘We don’t have to address class politics because demographics alone will remedy our situation in the years to come’.”
“They (the Democrats) need to go back to what they used to do 20, 30 years ago - probably 40 years ago - and represent people economically.”
An analysis of exit polls from the November 5 election, tells the story of how Ms Harris lost the election and which constituencies abandoned her. The key trend was Mr Trump winning 45 per cent of the Hispanic vote including a firm majority of Latino men. Just four years ago, Joe Biden won Latino men by 23 points.
Mr Trump was able to flip Starr County in Texas - the most Hispanic county in America where no Republican candidate has won since 1892.
On average, Hispanic communities shifted by ten percentage points towards Mr Trump, with Ms Harris also losing support among Latino women. While six out of ten voted for her in 2024, this was down on the nearly seven out of ten who backed Mr Biden in 2020.
Mr Trump also succeeded at engaging first time voters - winning more than half of this cohort in a reversal of the trend at the 2020 election. He also claimed a majority of white female voters for the third time in a row, (53 per cent) with this result lifting to more than 60 per cent for those without college degrees.
Patti Solis Doyle, the manager of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, was quoted in Politico saying “I do think that the country is still sexist and is not ready for a woman president.”
While African-Americans overwhelmingly supported Ms Harris (about 85 per cent), the data also suggested Mr Trump was able to double his support among Black men in some crucial areas like the swing state of Wisconsin where he was running at about 21 per cent - up from just 8 per cent in 2024.
By contrast, Ms Harris failed to win over women in the same numbers as either Joe Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite campaigning hard on the issues of abortion and reproductive rights.
Ms Ruffini said the failure of Ms Harris to generate more support from women was a key take-out from the election.
But it was men who mostly did not connect with Ms Harris, with prominent American intellectual Mary Eberstadt and senior research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute writing just days before the election for the First Things journal that young males were leaning more to the right than young women.
The divide between the genders was widening across the spectrum of issues from abortion, gender identity, the border wall and paying student debt with young men tuning into shows by Joe Rogan, Theo Von and the Nelk Boys to receive more positive affirmations of masculinity.
“Identity politics? The bros are over it,” she said. “Today’s New Right, like today’s populism, is powered in large part by a search for male authority, direction, and amour propre — a triad visible to anyone who can spell ‘Jordan Peterson.’”
“ (JD) Vance, who acts on this insight with more passion than anyone else on the national stage, has achieved the kind of personal and professional successes those young men want. He gets fist-pumps for saying what no one in the blue zone seems even to believe: Vance wants other guys to have those things, too ... That’s why hectoring young men of colour, as nannies-in-chief Barack and Michelle have lately attempted, won’t close the gap.”
The identity politics lessons stemming from the US election were quickly realised in Australia, with Opposition Indigenous Australians spokeswoman Jacinta Price - the face of the successful No campaign against the voice referendum in 2023 - arguing the result was more evidence that people were voting on issues rather than because of gender and racial allegiance.
“As the US election has shown, people are beginning to wake up the fact that they are allowed to vote on the basis of merit rather than race or any other identity,” Senator Price told The Weekend Australian. “I have long rejected race as the basis for any kind of decision making, whether it be an election candidate, government policy or anything else.”
“I am hopeful that the rejection of race as the basis for decision making will gain traction in Australia as well. This is the kind of approach we need across the board., but especially so when it comes to solutions for indigenous disadvantage.”
In what is being hailed as the greatest political comeback in American history, Mr Trump was able to make deep inroads in key Democratic strongholds across the nation including in New York - especially in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. Mr Trump reduced the Democratic margin across the blue state from 23 to 11 percentage points.
In California, the Democratic margin was slashed from 29 to 17 percentage points, while in
Maryland the Republicans closed the gap by ten percentage points and by nine percentage points in the state of New Jersey and in Illinois.
In the key swing states, Mr Trump was able to flip a total of ten counties including three in the key state of Pennsylvania - Monroe County, Northhampton County and Erie County, the latter of which is one of the key bellwether counties in America.
In Wisconsin, Mr Trump also won Sauk County - another bellwether that predicted the president for the fifth consecutive time.
Three counties were flipped in North Carolina including Anson County, Nash County and Pasquotank County. Another three were flipped in Georgia including Jefferson County, Washington County and Baldwin County, the latter of which had not been won by the Republicans for two decades.
Delivering his victory speech late on election night with his usual hyperbole, Mr Trump told his supporters that “we’ve built the biggest, the broadest, the most unified coalition.”
“They’ve never seen anything like it in all of American history. They’ve never seen it. Young and old, men and women, rural and urban. And we had them all helping us tonight,” he said. “They came from all quarters, union, non-union, African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, Arab-American, Muslim-American. We had everybody, and it was beautiful. It was a historic realignment.”